A Points South essay from the North Carolina Music Issue. Shortly after publishing the biography John Coltrane: His Life and Music, Lewis Porter received a letter from a man who identified himself as a Coltrane. Only not, presumably, one related…by
Benjamin Hedin |
Nov, 2018

A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue. When it snows, the entire post shuts down like there is no war going on. Perhaps the higher-ups decide to let those left behind, for the moment, savor the chance to shape snowmen with their children or lie…by
Zachary Lunn |
Nov, 2018

A feature essay from the North Carolina Music Issue. Rapsody now dons the mantle for a long tradition of black women, particularly those from the South, forcing Americans to look in the mirror of our professed ideals and to face…by
L. Lamar Wilson |
Nov, 2018

A Points South essay from our North Carolina Music Issue. After twenty-four years of educational experimentation and financial struggle, Black Mountain College closed in 1956. Today it is remembered primarily for its tremendous impact on the visual arts. Among the…by
John Thomason |
Nov, 2018

A Points South essay from the North Carolina Music Issue. Even with all the influences on his style and songs—Fred Miller, Blind Boy Fuller, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee, to name some—Henry had a large…by
Tom Rankin |
Nov, 2018

A Points South essay from the North Carolina Music issue. My hometown is just over an hour from Myrtle Beach, and so it was not unusual for people to make the pilgrimage to the Pad or the Spanish Galleon or…by
Jill McCorkle |
Nov, 2018

Track 20 – “Mill Mother’s Lament” by Ella May Wiggins; Performed by Shannon Whitworth Ella had grown up in the Smoky Mountains, first on farms and then in lumber camps, where she and her mother took in laundry while singing…by
Wiley Cash |
Nov, 2018

Notes on the songs from our 20th Southern Music Issue Sampler featuring North Carolina. The profiles, eulogies, and essays herein boast of remarkable achievements of North Carolina’s musicians across eras and genres: from unassailable legends (High Point’s John Coltrane, Tryon’s…by
Oxford American |
Nov, 2018

There’s an old song on one of these long-plays you sent last year for Christmas. “Poke Salad Annie, gators got your granny,” something like that. Well, old Poke Salad Annie and her no ’count daddy don’t have a thing to eat, so Annie goes out and picks her daddy a mess of greens in what they call a poke sack, which is I believe how the plant got its name—

Mal Mardis spun two spent rolls of color film on the bar, didn’t look up at Gus, and realized that cutting basic cable alone wouldn’t solve the problem. He’d also have to find a way for his wife to quit subscribing to the magazines. This morning’s mission was no different than when Brenda renovated their bathroom, den, or what used to be a two-car garage. Mal was supposed to drop off the film at any of the one-hour developers twenty miles from their house, use that time to buy at least two dozen frames, go back to the developer—Eckerd, Jack Rabbit, Walmart, One-Hour Photo—select the nicest shots, and ask that the person behind the counter now blow them up into 8 x 10s.

She is a music student, slender, youthful, with the concentrated face of an alto in the chorus or a back-row violinist, frowning at her strings. Tonight, wearing black (de rigueur for her profession), she sits in a chair to the left of and slightly behind the pianist. She is invisible.

Tip\'tip\ n, vt, tipped; tipped; tipping; tips- a: a small piece or part, an end <Jimmy Addison’s body looks ghost white without his clothes on and his shoulders shake each time he thrusts in and out. He lasts longer than I expected and when I know I won’t come my mind drifts. My bedroom is cluttered with late-afternoon shadows, the August-Alabama heat a wet wall. Through the half-closed shutters clouds billow up over the horizon.

I have become a slave owner. Yes, like you I believe in the freedom of all men—your Hungarians, the Poles, the Rumanians!—and in the role we artists must play—light-bringers, revealers of passion, sympathizers with the oppressed! But I have become a slave owner. It is a stain, a mark of rot. How many stains have I come to bear in these last weeks? They are countless.

Every night at bedtime, my wife turns the channel to those cable stations that show back-to-back-to-back-to-back episodes of murdered spouses and the forensic technology that prevents questionable and error-prone outcomes. This one particular channel airs one of these program’s reruns exclusively. It’s like the Killer Channel. Sometimes I wake up at three o’clock after hearing the show’s narrator go, “They exhumed the body a second time,” and open my eyes to find Lisette sitting straight up, staring at the screen.

Blaise St. Clair once sat down to make a list of all the people she had slept with. She knew it would be more than ten. Well, she knew it would be more than twenty. She had not imagined that the number would crest a hill and roll down the other side. It was an archeological dig.

The dogs got tied up to the chain fence blockin us kids from fallin out our backyards into the Tennessee River or the interstate. The dogs had one trough, but not all of ’em could reach it the same ’cause the choke chains was one size only and the dogs spread ’long the whole fence, so the ones in the middle or nearest the trough got mean quick.

You’re aware—at least I am—that eternity will devour everything in its own time, and that whatever mark is left will be gone, because that awareness is essential to the work: a sense of catching some slice of time itself, making it stand at attention, and still.